ANCHORAGE — Independent candidate Bill Walker has won the Alaska governor’s race, following an aggressive challenge to Republican Gov. Sean Parnell that included joining campaigns with a Democratic rival.

“I am beyond myself with excitement,” Walker said Friday evening. “It has been a long, long journey with a whole lot of Alaskans at my side.”

ANCHORAGE — Robert Paniyak looks back wistfully to a time more than two decades ago when he and other Alaska Native youths helped scientists capture and band geese to address declining numbers of migratory waterfowl in the state’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

ANCHORAGE — An Anchorage poet gets to realize her dream to visit the ghost of a remote western Alaska village where her Inupiat Eskimo ancestors once lived, thanks to funds she raised through crowdsourcing.